On the Significance of the ‘Lower’

Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste

Barbara Becker

The essay does not allow its department to be prescribed.

Instead of achieving something scientific or creating something
artistic, its very effort reflects the leisure of the childish, which
inflames itself on what others have already done... It does not
begin with Adam and Eve, but with that about which it wants to
speak; it says what understands about it, breaks off where it
feels itself at the end and not where there is nothing left
(Adorno, 1981)
Der Essay lässt sich sein Ressort nicht vorschreiben. Anstatt
wissenschaftlich etwas zu leisten oder künstlerisch etwas zu
schaffen, spiegelt noch seine Anstrengung die Muße des
Kindlichen wider, der ohne Skrupel sich entflammt an dem, was
andere schon getan haben... Er fängt nicht mit Adam und Eva
an, sondern mit dem, worüber er reden will; er sagt, was ihm
daran aufgeht, bricht ab, wo er selber am Ende sich fühlt und
nicht dort, wo kein Rest mehr bliebe (Adorno, 1981, p. 10)

Introductory Remarks
The paradox of writing about something about which it is difficult to speak, at least
when one wishes to describe what is special about the ‘lower’ senses, particularly
touch, leaves both reader and author with an uneasy feeling that the term does not
adequately describe the object in question. A sense of remaining inexact and inad-
equate cannot be avoided, even if one uses the most elaborate and cryptic style –
the moment of the inexplicable that is valid for sensual experiences in general and
especially for the proximate senses, is reflected in many ways in the following text.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the ‘lower’ senses have hitherto received
little attention within philosophy. The unnameability of sensual-physical immer-
sion in the world is in stark contrast to the clarity and generalisation striven for

B. Becker (B)
Universitätsprofessor für Medienwissenschaften an der Universität Paderborn
e-mail: bbecker@mail.uni-paderborn.de

K. Leidlmair (ed.), After Cognitivism, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9992-2_8, 133


C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
134 B. Becker

by rationality and reason.1 For this reason the following discussion will adopt nei-
ther a systematic nor a historical approach to physical-sensual embeddedness in the
world, but is rather an essayistic attempt to examine these senses and their relevance
for cognitive science discourse from multiple perspectives.
Because of these difficulties this contribution will open in a somewhat unusual
way, with a look at everyday speech. The different aspects which will later be dis-
cussed in this attempt to write about touch and, more briefly, taste and smell, are
manifest in a special way in everyday speech.
Everyday linguistic practice demonstrates the ways in which our cognitive abil-
ities are linked to the ‘lower’ senses of touch, taste and smell. To begin with the
tactile aspect which is central to this article: the root of the German verb ‘greifen’
(to grasp) can be found in ‘begreifen’ (to comprehend or grasp), to have something
under control (im Griff) and ‘unbegreiflich’ (incomprehensible). Another verb for
grasp, ‘fassen’, gives us ‘erfassen’ (to understand) and ‘unfassbar’ (incomprehensi-
ble). Thus it is evident how elementary touch is for our understanding of the world.
Associated idioms and phrases can be found in French, indicating the significance of
touch as a moment of verification: ‘toucher la realité du doigt’ put in words what we
have all experienced in everyday contexts: we secretly touch a decorative bouquet
of flowers in a restaurant to check whether it is made of artificial or natural flowers.
Is touch therefore a physical gesture by means of which the substance of visual or
acoustic impressions can be tested?
A further connection apparent in everyday speech is the association of emotions
and touch: we are touched by an event, a picture or a melody, in German one says a
person is ‘feinfühlig’ (literally fine-feeling, i.e. sensitive). The German verb ‘treffen’
(to hit or strike) appears in ‘betroffen’ (affected) and ‘getroffen’ (hurt). It is clear
here how immediately a touch can affect us, how fragile we become as the person
touched and touching, and that touches can evoke a wide range of feelings.
The extent to which communication processes are pervaded by touch can also be
seen in the word con-tact. To make contact with others not only describes linguistic
or written exchange but also being touched by others, whether in the concrete or the
metaphorical sense. Because of their specific resonating structure,2 touches always
lead to a decentring of the actors involved, a circumstance that will be described in
greater detail later.
Taste and smell are also of major significance for our view of the world, often
underestimated in philosophy,3 but evident in everyday language: the German
phrases ‘das stinkt mir’ (literally ‘that stinks to me’ = I’m fed up with it), ‘ich
kann ihn nicht riechen’ (I can’t smell him = I can’t stand him), and the English
phrases ‘I have no taste for that’ or ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’. Many more exam-
ples could be cited to show the significance of the so-called ‘lower’ senses. Smell

1 See the as always inimitable Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung, especially the
chapter about the cultural industry, Frankfurt 1969
2 Meyer-Drawe 1990
3 See also Mayer 1996
On the Significance of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste 135

and taste as virtually animal senses remain important senses for the assessment of
certain events, in spite of their neglect by epistemologists. Like animals, we still
sniff at food in order to decide whether it is edible or not. Smell still serves as an
indicator of danger (the smell of gas or burning, poisonous chemicals) just as taste
is a far superior indicator of bad food than visual perception. Furthermore, smell
and taste are important senses in an erotic context: a person’s smell can be seduc-
tive and beguiling, the taste of another person can send us into ecstasies, and dis-
gust and rejection are also attributable to such animal sensory impressions. Together
with touch in the broadest sense, smell and taste thus prove to be fundamental for
the specificity of situative embeddedness in the world; they are constitutive ele-
ments in the creation of those special atmospheres4 that serve as the frequently
implicit background for conscious and explicable sensory perceptions and cognitive
acts.5
Smell and taste are also particularly important triggers of memories.6 The taste
of a particular dish or a smell suddenly manifest can activate fragments of memories
and evoke internal images long believed to be lost. Events thought to be forgotten
and that were associated with a specific smell or taste emerge suddenly and confront
us with the past, in a happy or oppressive way.
As mentioned above, the fundamental significance of the ‘lower’ senses which
becomes apparent in everyday speech has scarcely been acknowledged in the history
of philosophy.7 On the one hand, a materialisation of these senses took place, sys-
tematically devaluing them in comparison to sight and hearing, in that the ‘lower’
senses were understood as purely physical, almost mechanical processes. On the
other hand, however, the de-substantiation and de-materialisation of these senses
was pursued by transferring them to a purely intellectual level.
This dichotomisation in the Cartesian tradition denied the interconnection of
materiality and intellectuality that is characteristic of the senses and the body, the
latter combining both an entity aware of physical experience and a material body,
without making both dimensions wholly congruent.8
I will concentrate largely on touch as a sense in the following, firstly because
within the philosophical tradition the phenomenologists at least have studied the
sense of touch, while the senses of taste and smell have generally been taken into
account to a far lesser extent. Secondly, the tactile sense has been (re)gaining sig-
nificance in recent times, not only in the context of the interface debate in computer
science but also in other disciplines, such as medicine where the tactile diagnosis
of diseases has suddenly begun to become important, even if it is not yet awarded
enough significance.

4 G. Böhme 1995
5 See also Peters 1996
6 See Corbin 1996
7 See Mayer 1996
8 See especially Merleau-Ponty 1986
136 B. Becker

Accordingly I will begin my contribution with two interconnected perspectives:

• The significance of touch, (and to a lesser extent) smell and taste for the develop-
ment of cognitive skills and the accumulation of knowledge will be discussed
• The relevance of touch for feelings, emotions and involvement in contact with
things and people will be demonstrated

The differentiation into (the physical act of) feeling and touch is based on the
assumption following from a similarly derived differentiation made by Waldenfels9 :
feeling is interpreted here as an intentional activity linked to motor activity while
touch is seen as something that links passive and active aspects.

Experiencing the World Through the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touching,

Smelling, Tasting

A person’s first contact with his/her environment takes place via the skin which can
be seen as the primary organ of touch.10 Babies are cuddled, fed, washed, have their
nappies changed and are touched in many ways on a daily basis by their parents or
other people. In this first infantile phase of development there is quite a symbiotic
link between the baby and the person to whom it relates most closely, whereby the
baby is closely linked to the other person by means of touch and is not yet able to see
itself as an individual separate from the other person.11 However, this early symbio-
sis is soon broken: the baby begins to explore its environment with its hands, grasps
things held out to it, pulls at hair, hands and other parts of the person looking after
it, touches its own body and thus acquires early experience of its environment and
itself.12 In this way a self that defines itself as distinct from others gradually devel-
ops. Visual perception, motor activity and the sense of touch are interconnected in
a special way in this context – the searching glance gains in meaning through con-
crete touch, touch is always associated with a particular body movement. Although
the interaction of the senses often evokes multi-layered experiences, the individual
senses can be differentiated from each other in that each enables its own perception
of the environment and determines its own specific reality through the associated
selective process.13
These multiple-perspective experiences are gradually expanded in the course of
ontogenetic development, whereby sight is initially focussed on touch: children
grasp everything that they can touch. They acquire knowledge about the nature of

9 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 2002

10 Anzieu 1992, Sechaud 1996
11 The difficulty with such assumptions lies in their ultimately hypothetical nature
12 Michel Serres refers several times to the importance of touching oneself as a constitutive moment
in the development of identity, see Serres 1996
13 Giesecke puts forward a similar argument in the same volume
On the Significance of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste 137

matter by touching the widest possible range of materials. They get to know dif-
ferent qualities of material and thus experience for themselves what the attributes
‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘hard’, ‘soft’ etc. mean. Through touching the child becomes familiar
with the place where an object or another person is and thus learns, beyond visual
and acoustic impressions, how things and their own person are physically situated
in space. Furthermore, through tactile exploration it acquires knowledge about the
form, weight, temperature and surface structure of things. Children explore their
environment by continually touching the things they encounter and they gradually
associate particular learned terms with the physically experienced objects. These
experiences are fundamental to further cognitive development: the specific seman-
tics of characteristics such as ‘rough’ or ‘polished’ is only comprehensible to some-
one who has touched rough and polished objects. Comprehending (grasping) and
understanding require prior exploration of the world through touching: thus we must
make contact with things, touch them and experience their resistance in order to
understand their qualities and recognise them as particular and individual objects.
As briefly indicated above, touching is always associated with movement. The
child approaches the object it wants to grasp, grasping itself is an active action that
always includes motor as well as sensory activity, i.e. feeling and seeing. Thus the
senses interact when a person grasps and explores an object, and they complement
each other and make possible a complex understanding of the object, whereby the
individual senses differ in their specific selectivity of perceptions of reality.
A brief mention should be made of the equal significance of taste and smell for
qualitative knowledge of the world: during the early phase of their development,
children put everything they can pick up into their mouths – the mouth as an organ
of touch and taste is just as central to sensory experience as the nose, whose sensory
information combines with touch and taste to form complex impressions. These
forms of sensory exploration of the world are not only of fundamental significance
for the development of cognitive skills in the course of ontogenetic development.
In later years also, touching things, materials and people is an important moment
of experience and an essential element in cognitive processes. In later years feeling
and touching things, materials and people remains an important moment of experi-
ence and an essential part of cognitive processes. The same is true of smelling and
tasting, which can remain significant for the development of a specific expertise and
in which real mastery may be achieved.
If we look at various professional fields in this context, the fundamental signifi-
cance of the sensory exploration of the world is quite obvious: well-versed geomor-
phologists can take some earth in their hands and by rubbing it between their fingers
can determine the distribution of grains (clay and sand) within the sample by touch
alone.14 They can also use their hands to trace the flow of ice thousands of years
ago in the rocks of glacial moraines. Experienced doctors can smell illnesses inde-
pendent of technical diagnostic instruments; they touch their patients’ bodies with

14 I
gained this impression in numerous discussions with the Cologne geomorphologist Ernst
Brunotte
138 B. Becker

their hands and thus form an impression of their overall constitution. How a person
smells and whether their skin is damp, warm, cold or dry can tell a lot and influence
further diagnostic measures. Experienced connoisseurs of wine can taste nuances in
a red wine that a lay person registers with incomprehension and envy. Competent
craftspeople can decide whether a certain construction is able to take a weight or not
or what complications might arise, simply by feeling the materials used with their
hands. In a word: a wide range of professions rely on impressions gained using the
‘lower’ senses, taking up on childhood experiences on the one hand and deepening
these in a manner specific to the profession in question on the other hand.
Tactile, olfactory and gustatory experiences require conceptual labelling and cat-
egorisation, especially when they are cognitively significant. Statements concerning
the nature of the felt object or material and assessments of the thereby deducible
consequences for a specific action require a reflective distance, without which sen-
sory reconnaissance would be limited to the moment. ‘Grasping’ is therefore not
only limited to touching and feeling, but also implies abstraction from the specific
process of touching as well as its reflective integration in the conglomerate of previ-
ous experiences. The same is true for olfactory and gustatory experiences: an enthu-
siastic ‘Hmmm, delicious’ when enjoying a particular dish or a good wine will not
satisfy an expert gourmet or a wine connoisseur – in this case conceptual abstrac-
tion is also necessary in order to enable the gustatory and olfactory impressions to
become a category that goes beyond individual perceptions.15
Another aspect that indicates the significance of feeling and touch should be men-
tioned: Voltaire spoke of ‘les mains de léxpérience’, referring to the significance of
the tangible which in his opinion was an indicator of the validity of knowledge. The
significance of touch as a sensory modality by means of which we can test the truth
or reality of what is merely seen or heard has a long history. The Christian tradition
tells the story of Jesus who appears to his apostles after the resurrection. Doubting
Thomas did not believe the mere evidence of his eyes and demanded to be permitted
to touch Jesus in order to convince himself of his existence.16 Today touch contin-
ues to be described as a sensory modality that enables direct contact with things and
by means of which one can make sure of their existence. From this point of view,
touching and feeling are fundamental to our view of the world. What cannot be felt,
touched or grasped runs the risk of being misinterpreted as a fiction, a delusion, a
phantom or a purely intellectual product. In this case too, distanced interpretation
and classification of what has been felt and touched is necessary before such assess-
ments can be made effectively. And likewise, smelling and tasting serve to verify
visual impressions: the appetising appearance of a dish can deceive, as we all know;
only smell and taste can provide information about the quality of the meal and may
produce a completely different impression from the visual one.

15 The attempt to explicate what is tasted or smelled in conceptual terms can produce results border-
ing on the ludicrous – wine specialists’ rich terminological inventiveness is an amusing example.
16 Seealso Böhme 1996
On the Significance of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste 139

It is only when they are interconnected that sensory experience and reflection
upon it make possible a form of knowledge about the world which is based mainly
on sensory reconnaissance but not limited to it. Distance from the object felt, tasted
and smelled is just as essential a condition of cognition as the sensory experience
itself.
Before I concentrate largely on tactile experience in the following, I would like
to summarise as follows: smell, taste and touch further the exploration of a person’s
environment in many ways, and are not only relevant to cognitive development but
can also provide fundamental qualifications for professional expertise.
However, the relevance of the ‘lower’ senses, especially the sense of touch, for
the development of cognitive skills is in itself ambivalent: as well as its exploratory
function and its immanent revelatory intention, the sense of touch also contains a
moment of monopolization of the object grasped. The physical gesture of grasp-
ing, which as well as the wish to explore does indeed aim to ‘have the upper hand’
of things or people and to keep them under control, reveals a latent moment of
desired omnipotence or potential force. However, the desire to subject the world
which is implied in the process of grasping and touching founders on the resistance
and momentum of the person or object encountered. The associated disempower-
ment of the touching individual will be discussed in the following, whereby the
‘pathic’17 character of tactile experience that become apparent in the chiasmus18 of
toucher and touched will be discussed.

Emotionality, Touch and Contact

The sense of touch is always also a contact sense, it implies proximity, a direct sense
of the otherness of the other person/object, whose resistance and momentum cannot
be ignored in concrete contact. The closeness and immediacy that come to light in
touching and being touched explain some of the ambiguities associated with touch
and show why the emotional level is involved in every touch/contact.
The relationship between being emotionally affected and touched is most appar-
ent in erotic contact. According to Barthes,19 touch in an erotic context is charac-
terised by a domain of faint and subtle signs, beginning with the searching look
reconnoitring the other person through to the concrete exploration of his/her body
by means of touch: the toucher and the touched, subject and object merge here,
the boundary between ‘you’ and ‘me’ becomes blurred. When the persons involved
allow themselves to be touched they become emotionally touchable and at the same
time feel themselves as fragile, permeable and deprived of boundaries – the con-
cretely felt closeness in physical contact dissolves the boundaries between egos,
which can only be maintained with difficulty anyway, at least in a situative context.

17 Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung 2002

18 Merleau Ponty, Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare 1986
19 See Barthes 1984
140 B. Becker

This leads to emotional upheavals. The desire to merge symbiotically with the other
person, the dissolution of skin boundaries through touch is in opposition to the
simultaneous need for delimitation in order to break the interwovenness of ‘I’ and
‘you’ and to reconfigure the self as distinct from the other person.
It is not only in the erotic sphere that touch is directly associated with the emo-
tional dimension. When we make contact with things and people we are touched,
not only in the somatic sense, but also on the level of feeling and experience. We
feel attracted or repelled, we seek or avoid direct physical contact, and we express
our relationship to the other person and our feelings through touch. This is how-
ever not devoid of risk. In touching we are simultaneously toucher and touched. The
supposed self-assurance of being autonomous and sovereign actors thereby proves
illusory. In touching we are both active and passive20 : we touch as actors but at the
same time are also touched by the other person, because the act of touching brings
together doing and suffering to be done. Thus something is particularly apparent in
touch that is true for all sensory and reflexive acts: we are always imbued with the
expectations of others who have already influenced our own wishes and intentions
before we even develop them. Thus in touch there is a silent contact with people and
things beyond any conscious perception.21
In this context it is understandable why touch is seen as a pathic sensory modality
– e.g. by Waldenfels. He understands the experience of touch as a form of ‘happen-
ing’, ‘as an experience that happens to someone’.22 According to Waldenfels being
touched or being affected precedes that which we touch. ‘What is crucial in this
context is that the being touched by another person or object precedes one’s own
touching. To put it in traditional terms, this means that self-affection occurs in the
course of heteronomous affection and does not precede it’.23 Thus touch makes it
possible for the self to experience itself as something touched, while simultaneously
saturated with the heteronymous expectations thereby perceptible. In this way the
‘lower’ senses, which initially appear to be our very own, are always subject to
social standardisations.24
Thus a pathic moment is manifest in the act of being affected by one’s envi-
ronment. This pathic moment is fundamental to all sensory experiences, but is
particularly significant for the ‘lower’ senses and especially touch. In this context
touch must be interpreted as pathos, as being touched in the sense of being moved
which precedes our grasping and understanding. However, touch thereby always
also implies a dimension of untouchability. This is because the intersection of the
toucher and the touched does not lead to a new totality but instead the person or
thing that is touched can never be wholly assimilated. There remains an unobtain-
able blind spot that is embedded in touch itself. In every touch there is therefore an

20 See also Meyer-Drawe 1990

21 See also Boehm 1986
22 Waldenfels 2002, p. 78
23 Ibid., p. 80
24 See also Giesecke, in the same volume, p. 10
On the Significance of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste 141

asymmetry which means that contrary to all intentions the other thing or person can
never be completely reached, because the thing or person being touched can always
withdraw from the grasp of the toucher.
If however the other thing or person is as it were separate from the toucher’s own
intentions then the supposed or desired dominance of the toucher with respect to
the touched in tactile encounters is undermined, as the intention of the toucher is
already the answer to the requirements of the touched.
Thus the self and the other are interwoven in a special way in touch. The
strangeness we encounter when touched by another is something we also encoun-
tered with reference to ourselves, not only when we experience ourselves as touched
and touching but also when we touch ourselves. This foreignness is manifest in the
resistance we experience in touching. The other withdraws from my grasp, directs
the touch in a different direction from that which was originally intended. Every
lover has had the experience that in spite of intimate attachment the other person
remains a stranger and at most this strangeness can be overcome at rare moments in
physical union. And the same is true when touching oneself where that which we
suppose to be absolutely ours suddenly becomes strange and an internal fissure in
our self-reference becomes apparent.
Thus every touch not only reveals the insurmountable foreignness of the other
(thing or person) but also shows that we remain strangers to ourselves even in
our response to the demands of the other. Touch touches on our physicality in a
special way that comes into play beyond the reach of any reflection. Thus every
touch contains a ‘surplus’ of meaning, a dimension which is purely perceptible
but which cannot be comprehended either reflectively or conceptually. In this way
we are entirely integrated into a responsive event25 that makes us both actors and
reactors. In physical touch we lose our fictionally projected position as sovereign,
autonomous individuals. This deprivation of power implies not only a narcissistic
insult but also makes us fearful. Every touch is accompanied by a decentring of our
own person, because it ‘degrades’ us to reactors instead of allowing us to remain
with the illusion of omnipotence and control. Furthermore, in every touch the phys-
ical aspect expresses itself independently and withdraws from the reflective control
of a sovereign Ego. Thus touch reveals a fragility of the self that is not always easy
to bear. The genuine ‘distant proximity’ which is apparent here because of the pathic
nature of touch bears witness to a moment of the ‘non-self in the self’26 which is
perceptible in touch. Accordingly I am already detached from myself and others
when I awake to a self.
The chiasmus of the self and the other (which is equally perceptible when touch-
ing oneself or being touched by others) clearly shows that the sensory experience
gained through tactile encounters must remain inexplicable, because a gap opens
between the self and the other in touch, so that I never merge entirely with the other
and a genuine distant proximity must be assumed, as a natural gap exists in the self,

25 See also Waldenfels 1999

26 Waldenfels 2002, p. 86
142 B. Becker

a moment of the non-self in the self. Thus the concept of chiasmus developed by
Merleau-Ponty27 does not mark a natural unity of subject and object that would
precede every experience, but describes a field of oscillation typical of touch, in
which a continual reversal takes place form proximity to distance and distance to
proximity in both directions. This distant proximity, which can be understood as
continuous fluctuation of grasping and letting go, contact and disconnection, points
quite generally to the wildness, polymorphous and multi-valued nature of the tactile
sense.28
The reversibility of subject and object, physical individual and environment
which once again becomes apparent here, creates an immeasurable increase
of meaning. In this context Kapust points out three significant aspects of this
reversibility:

– the breaking out of the other

– the possibility of the remodelling and transformation of a relationship and
– the potential for plurality and variety.29

Accordingly a new quality can emerge from the intersection of subject and
object. This can be expressed in an interruption and transformation of established
routes and can lead to a destabilisation of fixed relations if the openness of this
reversibility is admitted and accepted. Strange moments that break into the given
and transcend it can lead to radical changes if one is willing to expose oneself to the
foreignness and resistance (Widerfahrnis) of the other.

Concluding Remarks

What do these considerations signify for the current programme of the cognitive
sciences?
In view of the above discussion, it seems highly problematic that the ‘lower’
senses have hitherto largely been ignored in the study of cognitive processes, as our
understanding of the world is fundamentally shaped by these: we sense the atmo-
sphere of a situation before we could describe it in specific terms; we grasp the
meaning of many phenomena and facts through tactile experience and we learn their
meaning by physical-sensory means without being able to explicate it completely.
Our experiences through the ‘lower’ senses point to an indeterminable dimension
which is of elementary significance for cognitive processes but which is almost
impossible to express in abstract categories.
Models of cognitive processes that ignore the elementary sensory processes
are therefore inadequate. The amorphous, largely inexplicable background to our

27 Merleau-Ponty, Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare, 1986

28 See also Waldenfels 2002
29 For a more detailed discussion see Kapust, A. Berührung ohne Berührung, München 2002
On the Significance of the ‘Lower’ Senses: Touch, Smell and Taste 143

cognitive abilities is a fundamental basis for the genesis of meanings, as should

have become apparent from the preceding discussion. This has now been accepted
by many cognition scientists. In accordance with this insight scientists are making
efforts in the field of cognitive robotics to equip robots with these sensory abilities
and in particular equip them with the ability to make a tactile exploration of their
environment. We will have to wait and see if the artefacts learn to grasp/comprehend
objects in this way – at least such a procedure appears more interesting than the clas-
sic approach of processing symbols, where the physical-sensory dimension of our
cognitive abilities is barely acknowledged.

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